Geographers study humans and their interactions with the environment

These scholars have something in common. Guess what it is:

Professor Carol Rosen is fascinated by why Wisconsin residents maintain such a strong identification with their ethnic heritage even generations after their ancestors moved to the state.

Assistant Professor Eric Compas, who began his career mapping caves, spends his research time studying national parks (not a bad gig, he admits).

Assistant Professor Margo Kleinfeld is studying human trafficking and finds that a great deal of it may actually be going on here in Wisconsin and, even more surprising, a fair amount of human trafficking takes place in the state's rural areas.

Assistant Professor Jeff Zimmerman finds prairie grasses growing in Chicago and estimates that the greening of Chicago under the current Mayor Richard Daley is somewhat equivalent to the city's building boom under Daley's father -- and for many of the same reasons.

What the scholars have in common is an interest in "human geography." They are faculty members of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Department of Geography and Geology and, though their research certainly deals with maps and physical features of the land, their primary emphasis is on the study of humans and how they interact with their environment.

Not surprisingly, they also think that such study is important if a democratic society is to thrive and survive a changing world.

"I firmly believe that human geography teaches us tolerance of cultures other than our own," Rosen said. "Whether we agree with a cultural tradition or not, the educational process that we go through allows us to form intelligent opinions upon which to make choices for ourselves and our communities."

Wisconsin provides fertile ground for such study because it has a long history of immigration by people of many cultures.

Rosen said her own family's church is an example: "When I was baptized, my parents' church had services in German and English. When my children were baptized there, the services were in Spanish and English. Today, the services are in Spanish, English and Hmong!"

That fact also illustrates the complexities of the national debate about "English only" restrictions, she said.

"Back a number of years, European immigrants arrived at areas where others of their ethnicity had already settled. They had the luxury of speaking their native language around their neighborhood and at church and, often, at school,” Rosen said. “They also found jobs in factories and on farms where they did not have to have a command of the English language. What I am saying is, they had some time to adjust to their environment and they didn't have to become assimilated immediately."

Even today, Rosen said, "many ethnic groups are still located in their original areas of settlement. For example, the Polish are in central Wisconsin and Green Bay, the Swiss in Green County, the Finnish in the northern tier of counties and the many Norwegians and Swedes in the western part of the state -- and that's just to name a few examples."

Kleinfeld says her interests in human trafficking crystallized after the 2004 tsunami which left thousands of Asian children orphaned. She had been studying the plight of war-affected children in Sri Lanka and found that after the tsunami there reports that children had been victims of human trafficking.

"Some of these claims turned out not to be accurate, but it got me interested in the issue,” she said. “As I read more, I found out that human trafficking was a global problem. At about that time, I was encouraged by my department at UW-Whitewater to do some research locally, and so I started to wonder about human trafficking in the United States."

As it turned out, the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance was collecting data on the subject but hadn't asked many demographic questions about age, ethnicity and other subjects about victims of such trafficking. Kleinfeld received a grant from the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and Ethnicity to do further research and sent out survey questions to 1,800 people.

The study is now in preparation for publication. Those who responded to the survey say that they have encountered nearly 250 potential victims of human trafficking, ranging from abusive or coerced marriage to labor exploitation. Women were more likely to be exploited in urban areas; men more likely to be exploited in rural areas, she learned.

Kleinfeld said she was surprised at the number of men who were identified as victims.

"Ironically, in the case of victims of human trafficking, it seems that males may be the most vulnerable insofar as they are under-counted and, perhaps, underserved,” she said. “Sadly, many of us are more comfortable thinking about human trafficking victims as females. I think there are many more men out there who need assistance. I've got some work to do, though, to support this."

To Zimmerman, who studies the "greening of Chicago," the range of human geography from joyous folk festivals in Wisconsin to human trafficking across the state, is what makes the discipline fun.

"In the broadest sense, it's basically the study of the spatial aspects of society," Zimmeman said. "It is interdisciplinary in that it borrow from economics, anthropology and other disciplines, giving birth to all of them."

His interest in Chicago grew from his graduate dissertation on urban geography and ecology -- partially because Chicago is a nearby city.

What he learned is that Daley has vowed to make Chicago America's "greenest" city.

"If you walk down State Street in the Loop, you see the landscaping is not just planter boxes filled with flowers,” Zimmerman said. “If you walk down Ashland Avenue you find the central median landscaped with prairie plants. It's pretty unbelievable how the city has softened its hard, industrial edge with prairie grasses and native landscaping."

Why?

"In part, I think, the city is going green because it wants to be considered as the site of the 2016 Olympics. One theme of the Olympics will be sustainable urbanism and the Chicago government is putting a lot of investment dollars into high-profile green technology," he said.

The job of the human geographer in studying green Chicago, Zimmerman continues, is to "look at the empirical data and judge how successful these practices have actually been.

The investment in downtown Chicago has certainly made that part of the city more attractive, Zimmerman said.

"But all these green changes represent investment, they represent tax dollars collected in every part of the city but spent in the high-profile, gentrifying neighborhoods the city wants to promote,” he said. “Are these green changes just? Is the "green" language of the city a means of promoting corporate enterprises?"

The difference between the industrialized emphasis of Chicago under the first Mayor Daley and that of today "is like the difference between night and day," but it may well be the reasoning of "Daley II is basically the same as Daley I, in promoting land values," Zimmerman said.

Compas, who recently was a leader of UW-Whitewater's Earth Day observances, looks at land values from a different perspective. He studies the development of land near national parks, Yellowstone in particular.

"One of the surprising conclusions of my research is that environmental groups in one county out west have been able to protect more land than has been subdivided into little ranchettes," he said.

One reason is that "wealthy easterners" who are interested in Yellowstone are also well connected in Washington, D.C., and are able to influence public policies toward protecting environmentally threatened areas.

Compas, the son of a geographer, said his interest in the subject -- and in the environment -- started early when "I mapped caves when I was a kid, made cave maps by hand. Cartography has always been a central part of geography."

Because of his interest in the parks and the subdivisions that surround him, Compas says his work "keeps one foot on either side of the divide between physical geography and human geography."

The study is important because of his central concern for the environment, Compas said.

"If I wanted to influence the protection of the nation's parks, I knew I had to learn the patterns of land use and human use that affects those parks," he said.